It has been roughly a year since the national health care debate began in earnest. But despite all the Tea Parties, warnings about death panels and socialism, and claims that President Obama is a socialist or Nazi who was not born in the United States, many things have not changed in the last 12 months.

More than 45 million people did not have health insurance last spring, 1.5 million of them in North Carolina, and they still don't have it today. People with preexisting conditions were being denied coverage then and they are being denied coverage now.

Insurance premiums and insurance company profits were rising last year and they are rising again. The pharmaceutical industry was using some of its staggering profits to defeat proposals to allow the government to use its bargaining power to buy drugs at lower prices and it's still exerting that influence now.

Misleading polls were presented last spring to prove that people were overwhelmingly opposed to President Obama's reform proposals and they are still being cited now as a final vote in Congress approaches.

A survey taken last summer during the height of the town hall protests found that only 36 percent of American liked Obama's health care ideas, but when they were read an objective summary of the plan, 53 percent supported it.

A survey conducted last month found that almost of 40 percent of the people who told pollsters they opposed the current health care reform proposals were against them because the reforms didn't go far enough. Yet right-wing politicians and the think thanks that support them continue to claim every day that the vast majority of the American people are against the reforms now under consideration and think they go too far.

And just like last summer, the only solutions offered by the corporate-funded faux grassroots misinformation crowd are warmed over versions of health savings accounts that are really just tax shelters for the wealthy and proposals to let companies sell insurance across state lines, which is nothing but a way for the insurance companies to offer plans with far less coverage to mislead people who buy them into thinking they will be protected when faced with their next medical crisis.

That's about the extent of it, though the anti-reformers admitted last summer and admit now that we need to ban insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, an odd position for people who say the problem is that we have too much regulation even as they suggest another one.

President Obama told a crowd in Ohio this week the story of a cancer survivor who had to give up her insurance because her premiums increased 40 percent. The anti-reformers desperate to protect the broken system had no answer for those stories last summer and they still have no answer.

Yet their ridiculous rhetoric about communism and fascism and every ism they can think of continues, as do their absurd claims that they are defending our freedom by denying people the ability to see a doctor when they are sick.

The health care system was broken last year and it is still broken today. President Obama was elected after promising he would fix it. Let's get on with it. People have waited and suffered long enough.